


Five Wishes

by Mireille



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Buffy Wishverse, Community: femslash_minis, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-20
Updated: 2014-02-20
Packaged: 2019-03-22 05:50:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13757631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mireille/pseuds/Mireille
Summary: Cordelia's just trying to have a normal high-school experience. The universe isn't cooperating.





	Five Wishes

 

****

  
  
The weird part was all the locked classroom doors. No teacher's name on the outside, no class schedule posted, and when Cordelia looked through the windows of a couple of them, just a lot of empty desks crammed wherever they would fit.  
  
Getting to homeroom showed her where all those desks had come from. She'd kind of been expecting lots of empty chairs, the way things had been in June, but it looked like the school had figured out they'd never need thirty desks in a room again.  
  
And they'd still managed to stick her in a homeroom with exactly none of her friends. How did that happen? If she didn't know better, she'd have been afraid that she was the only cool person left in Sunnydale.  
  
She wasn't the only cool person left in Sunnydale, she reminded herself. She'd talked to Harmony on the phone that morning. Her friends were all still alive. They were just in different homerooms.  
  
Besides, Cordy thought as she slid into an empty desk, she was the one who decided who at Sunnydale High got to be cool, at least for the junior class. She could  _make_  this be a homeroom full of cool people, if she wanted it to be.   
  
When the bell rang and Mr. Ramirez started reading off a list of new school rules, Cordelia only halfway paid attention. Most of them she already knew about; they'd sent letters out over the summer. No after-school activities. Football and cheerleading practices during phys ed. The team would spend the night out of town for away games, and home games would be on Saturday mornings.  
  
"Or they could just cancel football," muttered someone behind Cordelia. She turned around to glare.  
  
Of course it was Nancy. Nancy had started acting like they were all doomed last year before spring break, when things hadn't even been all that bad yet. . She wrote editorials for the school paper about how stupid it was to assume that the mayor and the cops would straighten everything out. She probably thought they should stop having school altogether and just spend their time fighting vampires.  
  
"Do you  _mind_?" she snapped. "Some of us would like to have a halfway normal high school experience."  
  
"Then maybe you should start going to a halfway normal high school, because this isn't ever going to be one again."  
  
Cordelia wished she could come up with a scathing reply, but she was scared Nancy might be right.  
  


****

  
  
"I can't believe you were actually cheering. Way to pretend the quarterback  _didn't_  get eaten on Tuesday." Nancy was leaning on the fence surrounding the football field, occasionally glancing up at the sky like she needed to reassure herself that the sun was still high in the sky.  
  
Which it was,  _duh_. Cordelia didn't know what the school board had told the state athletic association, but they really had managed to get home football games moved to Saturday mornings. And since every motel in Sunnydale had closed down over the summer--except that one by the warehouse district, the one that probably wasn't any more dangerous with vampires around than it had been when it was just crawling with junkies and pimps and God knew what else--they didn't have to worry about the visiting team getting slaughtered the night before the game.  
  
The  _home_  team, apparently, wasn't that lucky. "I'm a cheerleader," Cordelia said. "I lead cheers, no matter how I feel about it."  
  
"How do you feel about it?"  
  
Cordelia frowned. She and Nancy had most of their classes together this year, and the lack of other people to talk to in a lot of them had meant they'd had more conversations in the past three months than they had since kindergarten, but they weren't best friends or anything. They were totally not at the "talk about your feelings about people we know dying at least four times a week" stage. "How do you think I feel?"  
  
Nancy shrugged. "No idea. That's why I asked."  
  
There wasn't a lot Cordelia could say to that. "What are you even doing here? I thought you said it was sick for us to go on acting like things were normal here."  
  
"It is sick. I didn't watch the game. I just came to make sure you got home okay."  
  
Cordelia rolled her eyes. Just because  _once_ \--before the curfew had gone into effect, even--she'd gone to an after-game party and then decided, with the help of some very, very spiked punch, that she should walk home alone after dark, and Nancy had found out about it, that didn't mean that Nancy had to walk her home after every football game.  
  
And call her house most nights to make sure Cordelia was home and safe. Really, it was getting to be some kind of joke.  
  
"You don't have to walk me home."  
  
"I know I don't have to. I want to, and I'm going to, so stop arguing and come on."  
  
She snorted. "Are you going to kiss me goodnight at the front door, too? Because you are  _totally_  acting like an overprotective boyfriend."  
  
Nancy grinned at her. She didn't know how often Nancy had smiled before last year, but she knew it didn't happen much these days. "Wouldn't that be an overprotective girlfriend?"  
  
It was nice to have somebody making sure she was okay, to be honest. Her mom had taken off for L.A. once it became pretty obvious things in Sunnydale were going to stay super-creepy, and her dad spent a lot of nights at work, because he didn't want to leave after sundown even if it meant Cordelia was home alone.  
  
Nancy wasn't exactly  _cool_ , but she was smart, and she could be funny, and she cared, at least a little, about what happened to Cordelia. And she wasn't exactly Cordelia's type, but Cordelia wasn't as sure about that as she used to be.  
  
When Nancy said goodbye at the end of Cordelia's driveway, she wished Nancy  _had_  kissed her goodbye. It would have made it easier to decide whether her type, like everything else in the universe, wasn't what she'd always thought it would be.  
  


****

  
  
The cool thing to do this year, Cordelia had decreed, was to go to the winter brunch in a group. Yeah, in the past, that would have branded you as a dateless loser, but when your social circle had lost three times as many boys as girls, the magnanimous thing to do was to suggest that nobody try to get a date--even though Cordelia could have  _totally_  gotten one and was in no way afraid that she'd have been one of the losers standing on the sidelines.  
  
Besides, it wasn't like this was a  _dance_. It was  _brunch_ , which was a thing thirtysomethings did on Sunday mornings, not a school event. There was a DJ--some guy who obviously did weddings and crap most of the time, because everyone with musical taste had either left Sunnydale or been at the Bronze that night--but mostly, people just stood in little clumps, wearing dark colors even if it was broad daylight.  
  
Even in the little clumps of brown and black clothing, it wasn't hard to find Nancy. She was standing over by the gym door, talking to Larry Blaisdell--who was apparently taking the cancellation of the basketball season really hard, because he'd started hanging out in the library, of all places--and some guy Cordelia vaguely recognized as one of Devon's friends. Before Devon had gotten killed.  
  
She hadn't really talked to Nancy outside of class since football season ended--with a forfeit of their last three games, because they couldn't get eleven guys on the field even when they'd let Jonathan play--and she wasn't sure she wanted to now. Nancy was probably glad to be free of the job of keeping Cordelia alive. Not that anybody had ever asked her to do it, and not that Cordelia needed it, and Cordelia was definitely not missing her. In fact, she was going to stop looking over that way right now.  
  
Not fast enough, because Nancy saw her, and grinned, and started making her way across the not-really-all-that-crowded gym.  
  
"Oh, my God," Harmony said, nudging Cordelia with her elbow. "I know things are different this year, but she could have at least put on a  _dress_."  
  
It would have been so easy to agree with Harmony. Okay, she did agree with Harmony, sort of, except that it wasn't like Nancy had showed up in ripped jeans and a dirty t-shirt, and she couldn't remember Nancy coming to school in a skirt since school picture days back in elementary school. She didn't remember Nancy at any of the school dances back when those were still a thing, because Nancy had been lost in the crowd.  
  
The crowd was a lot harder to get lost in these days.  
  
And it really would have been easy, even now, to agree with Harmony, except that Cordelia remembered wanting Nancy to kiss her, remembered how many times she'd thought about what it would have been like to kiss Nancy, and so instead, she took a couple of steps forward, smiling big, and said, "Nancy. Want to dance?" Nobody was even going to laugh, Cordelia told herself, because it had taken a while for it to sink in that macho "I'm not scared" crap would  _get you dead_ , and of the eight people actually dancing to whatever disco nightmare the DJ had dug up, only one of them was a guy.  
  
She hadn't thought about the possibility of people laughing when Nancy rolled her eyes and snorted. "Yeah, right." Before Cordelia could start to get angry--because it didn't hurt, of course; she was  _Cordelia Chase_ , Nancy was a nobody, and that still meant something--Nancy went on, "Want to get out of here? I could walk you home."  
  
She didn't walk Cordelia home, though, at least not right away. What she did was walk Cordelia out of the gym and around the corner of the vo-tech building. "I think I owe you about half a dozen goodbye kisses," she said, and kissed her.  
  
"I think you do," Cordelia said, and that totally answered the question of whether or not she wanted Nancy to kiss her. She definitely wanted Nancy to kiss her, because Nancy was funny and seemed to like Cordelia and was a really good kisser. It didn't hurt that Cordelia's options were more limited than they used to be, but she was pretty sure Nancy would have had a pretty good chance anyway.   
  
Vampires  _and_  a cheerleader having not-very-secret lesbian smooches with a geek--so that was her world now. Cordelia wished she knew anybody who worked in TV, because that would  _so_  be perfect for a series, at least on one of the crappy little networks.  
  


****

  
  
"You're going to the library again?" This was getting ridiculous. She knew Nancy was kind of a geek--not Super-Geek, she hadn't stepped into Willow Rosenberg's shoes or anything, but still, she liked books, a lot. But this wasn't about books. This was about Nancy and her weird assortment of friends, and the way they all hung out in the library, with the librarian, who wasn't exactly going to win anybody's "stable adult role model" award. Okay, he wasn't the only teacher who came to school smelling like her dad's liquor cabinet these days, but still, it was kind of creepy that he let them hang out in the library even after curfew.  
  
"Yeah, why?" Nancy fidgeted with the chain of the cross hanging around her neck. Cordelia thought about pointing out that it was really uncool to wear them, just like it was uncool to wear that turtleneck. Maybe they were all avoiding vampire-bait colors, but it was  _not_  trendy to look  _scared_.  
  
"I thought we could do something." She pushed her books farther down on the bench to make room for Nancy to sit down, but Nancy didn't take the hint.  
  
"Great, come with me. We could use another pair of hands."  
  
She gave Nancy her widest, most irresistible smile. "Or we could do something with  _my_  friends, since they've made it clear that they're okay with us being, you know, together."  
  
"Look, Cordy, it's great that your friends don't hate you for dating a girl. Or just someone they didn't personally approve first. But they do hate  _me_ , and I hate  _them_ , and anyway, I have a meeting."  
  
"Oh, right. Your little vampire-fighting club." The principal really should have put a stop to that. There weren't supposed to be any extra-curricular activities because it was too dangerous to stay at school after classes were over, and this was, like, a double dose of dangerous. She'd seen Nancy's backpack. It had wooden stakes in it, for God's sake.   
  
Nancy glared at her. "Somebody has to do something about them."  
  
"Um, yeah, that's what the police are for? And they'll probably call in the National Guard or something eventually. You're a bunch of high-school kids. What are  _you_  going to do?"  
  
"What are  _you_  going to do?" Nancy countered. "Sit here and wait for them to come get you?"  
  
"Go to the mall? Hang out until curfew? Have a life? And then five minutes after graduation, get the hell out of this place and never look back. We're not supposed to be the ones responsible for saving the world. Not to mention that you could totally get  _killed_."  
  
"Yeah. But I could get killed walking my dog." Nancy sighed and pushed her hair back out of her face. "Okay, Cordelia. Go to the mall. Have fun. Just--be careful."  
  
"But you're still going to the library." Cordelia scowled at her.  
  
"Yeah, I am. I get what you're saying, I really do. We're not supposed to be the ones fixing this. Thing is, nobody else is doing anything about it, so I kind of think I have to." She sighed, then gave Cordelia a quick kiss on the corner of her mouth. "And if you don't want to be part of that, that's fair, but I have to."  
  
"Did I mention that you could totally get killed?"  
  
"I know. But I have to do it anyway."  
  
 _I don't want you to get killed,_  Cordelia didn't say. "Fine. Go have fun with the weirdo patrol."  
  
Nancy didn't go yet, just stood there chewing on her lip for a while. Finally, she leaned down and gave Cordelia a quick kiss on the corner of the mouth. "I'm sorry." Cordelia was about to be generous and forgive her even without any groveling, but Nancy went on, "If you don't want to be part of it—if you don't want  _me_  to be part of it, that's fair. But I don't think I can be part of, of this--" she waved her hand back and forth in the air between them-- "any more, either. I can't be with somebody who doesn't want me to do the right thing."   
  
Even after Nancy walked away, Cordelia sat on the bench, wishing she'd known she was being dumped in time to have dumped  _Nancy_ \--who did she think she was, anyway? If there was going to be breaking up, Cordelia was supposed to do the breaking--first.  
  


****

  
  
Senior year was supposed to be awesome. Cordelia had been looking forward to her senior year of high school since  _first grade_. She and her friends were going to rule the school, have the coolest clothes and the best boyfriends, and everything was going to be about having fun.  
  
 _Right_. She and her friends ruled the school, all right, but the senior class was down to three homerooms, from the twenty-three they'd started freshman year with, so it was a pretty pathetic kingdom. Not to mention the total lack of sports, clubs, parties that ended after four p.m.--right now, she'd have been grateful for the chance to have a part-time job, just so she could leave the house, but it was hard to find something that didn't break curfew. "Fun" wasn't a word anybody really had in their vocabulary any more.  
  
She had the coolest clothes, too, but it didn't mean as much when the first thing you had to look for was "won't attract vampires."  
  
And, well,  _boyfriends_. She could get a date if she wanted to, whenever she wanted to. She  _did_  get dates when she wanted, not that there were many options for things to do on a date these days. She definitely didn't have a broken heart, especially since she and Nancy had broken up  _months_  ago. At least there had been no witnesses, and Nancy didn't argue when Cordelia spread the word around that she'd been the one to do the dumping.   
  
But Nancy didn't even go to most of her classes any more--one of the few times Cordelia had a chance to talk to her, she said she was catching up on sleep, since the White Hats (a stupid name if Cordelia had ever heard one) spent a lot of the nights in Oz's van, looking for people dumb enough to be out past curfew and getting them to safety. Which, apparently, sometimes meant fighting off vampires.  
  
Cordelia had just rolled her eyes, doing her best to make sure Nancy knew how unimpressed she was. Because she was, really. Vigilantism was  _not_  the way to go. The Mayor had said so. The principal said so. Her dad said so, when Nancy and her friends had brought him home the night he'd hit the bar after work and forgot to keep an eye on the time.  
  
But Nancy and her friends had brought her dad home, and even though he never really had time for Cordelia these days, he was all she had. And Nancy was  _Nancy_ , and Cordelia missed her, and she was pretty sure from the way she caught Nancy looking at her on the days Nancy made it to history class that Nancy missed her too.  
  
Cordelia wished she could put things right between them, but Cordelia Chase was not the kind of person to admit that she'd been wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> Cordelia's just trying to have a normal high-school experience. The universe isn't cooperating.


End file.
